Europeans are often quick to run America down because its history and traditions are shorter than in Europe. Yet, when it comes to roulette, the United States has preserved the earlier version of the game whereas the Europeans changed the format. The original French version with a single and a double zero wheel came over to the New World with the first waves of immigrants and found its first home in New Orleans. The new Americans, never slow to know a good thing when they saw it, quickly took the game up the Mississippi on the river boats into the West.

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Unfortunately, everyone thought that cheating was a part of the game and industries sprang up to manufacture biased wheels or devices that could quickly be installed on wheels to change the random quality of each spin. Eventually, some degree of order was introduced and the tables were redesigned to place the wheel more openly on top of the table. This allowed everyone a better sight of the wheel’s operation and, if a dispute arose, a simple lifting of the wheel to see whether anything untoward had been placed on the wheel itself or inside the table. Slowly, regulation was introduced with inspectors appointed to ensure “fair play”.

The betting was also slightly simplified and the layout of the table changed to improve access by the players. In part, this reflects the environment. The US version of the game was often played in a rough-and-tumble atmosphere of barely suppressed violence and surrounding illegality. The European game was essentially a middle- and upper-class game played at spa resorts and holiday destinations. It was always associated with style and refinement.

As the twentieth century slowly worked its way through the decades, the number of casinos began to expand. Towards the end of the century, there were several hundred. When talking about roulette, this does rather challenge orthodoxy. Why should tens of thousands of losers in casinos every day accept odds that so obviously favour the House. The US House takes more than double the edge of its European counterparts (depending on which rules are being played). The answer to this quirk of human nature is probably that the well-hyped sight of a few delirious big winners encourages the losers to believe that they are going to have their own lucky streak and win big too. More generally looking around US culture, it seems to have adopted a winner-take-all casino approach to the economy. Instead of everyone working and spreading the fruits of their labour more evenly through society, a few people make fortunes by depending on lucky breaks and exploiting the losses of everyone else. The losses of the suckers become the winnings of the few elite players in the casinos, and the income gap in the real world between rich and poor steadily widens.

Perhaps it is a compensation that, when playing roulette online, most players are given the choice of whether to play American or European roulette. This gives everyone the chance to play the European version with the better odds.

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